That’s the ambiguity at the heart of The Informant! Loosely adapted by theprolific if not always artistically successful Steven Soderbergh from KurtEichenwald’s investigative reportage, TheInformant! tells the story of an executive at agribusiness giant ArcherDaniels Midland(ADM) who turns in his bosses over a price-fixing scheme, even as he sinks intohis own swamp of corruption.
Matt Damon gained around 30 pounds to play the doughywhistle-blower, Mark Whitacre, an unremarkable man with a cheesy mustache andtasteless Wal-Mart ties who walks with the stiff gait of someone battling anoutburst of flatulence. He considers himself a good neighbor, a listener, theguy who always wears the white hat. He earned a Ph.D., but his degree inbiochemistry gave him the pretense of an education rather than the broadsubstance. Although claiming fluency in many languages after working for ADM inGermany,he never mastered the tenses and can’t recall how to pronounce the car hedrives, a Porsche. Whitacre’s head is stuffed with banalities, the lint oftelevision and pulp fiction. Little wonder that when he becomes an FBIinformant, he processes the adventure in terms of John Grisham and James Bond.
Seizing upon the story’s potential for humor,Soderbergh placed every aspect of the scenario in big quotation marks of irony.The moody jazz of the opening scene, the flashes of spinning reel-to-reelrecorders and even the rotund typography of the credits suggest one of thosegreat ’70s films about conspiracy and paranoia. But the jangling horns andguitars of a ’60s spy flick that trail Whitacre as he wears an FBI wire into abusiness meeting work from the opposite angle. We’re meant to laugh at this hopelesslybourgeois man whose file-clerk mentality harbors dreams of grandeur; at hisprissy wife and their spotless home; at all the Abraham Lincoln and Americaneagle kitsch that clutters not only Whitacre’s environment, but also that ofhis bosses and the central casting FBI agents who become his handlers. Yet, The Informant! is too soft for socialsatire. Although modestly amusing, nothing sticks.
With his usual boyish, all-American charm, Damonplays the perfect sociopath, a role he honed to perfection a decade ago in The Talented Mr. Ripley. As Whitacrebecomes increasingly lost in his own delusions, papering over his graft withflimsy rationalizations, Damon plays it as pressed and straight as abusiness-shirt collar. He is the steady metronome in an otherwise indifferentstory. Blink and you might lose track of the fact that ADM really was guilty ofprice fixing, and that some of Whitacre’s accusations were truethe rays of sunamid the dark forest of his delusions.n
